The Federal Communication Commission's proposal for new net neutrality rules will allow internet service providers to charge companies for preferential treatment, effectively undermining the concept of net neutrality, according to The Wall Street Journal. The rules will allow providers to charge companies for preferential treatment so long as they offer that treatment to all interested parties on "commercially reasonable" terms, with the FCC deciding whether the terms are reasonable on a case-by-case basis. Providers will reportedly not be able to block individual websites, however.

While several parts of the world - Chile first, Netherlands second, EU followed only recently - move towards proper net neutrality, the US tries to kill it dead for its own citizens.

We have OSnews quoting TheVerge who is sourcing New York Times who runs a subscription based website. I am not saying Thom is doing anything wrong but I believe I'd like to see the the new rules and form my own opinion instead of having my opinion decided for me through 4 layers of separation from actual data.

The "preferential treatment" written by the verge was not in quotes so I assume it is not an actual quote from the FCC.

The reason I make this point is what I believe the reality may be is Netflix etc. wants to outlaw paid peering agreements and the FCC seeks to allow paid peering which really just means selling Internet access to people buying it which is what Internet Service Providers actually do.

What Netflix is doing today is refusing to buy ports and saying "look, those guys are bullying us by limiting our traffic" when in reality limiting traffic is what happens if you don't buy enough bandwidth to carry all of it.

Charging for bandwidth is an incredibly normal thing to do and should be legal but calling it "preferential treatment" is editorializing it to the point of dishonesty.

If Netflix was making the case that they are being charged too much money compared to other businesses they have a legitimate case but their complaint seems to be that they believe it should be illegal for ISP's to charge them for directly connecting (peering) at all and if that is really what's at stake here the FCC is making the right decision.

Either way the agreement wouldn't be complete without the FCC giving itself more power (and by extension probably more tax money) under the proposal.

If your scenario is true then the problem would really be that the legislation is being written in legalese rather than as a technical document. This isn't surprising, but then at the same time we can't act surprised when a lawyer can't transmute basic technical issues such as direct peering v's transit v's IX into something approaching Latin...

As I am reading more its starting to confirm my suspicion. The new rules being proposed seem to deal with the last mile and outlawing "blocking". "blocking" would be the practice of saying "if you want to get to Google that's $5 more a month".

I doubt ISP's were ever planning on trying that as a business model but that was the biggest fear of many net neutrality supports and the new law would prohibit it officially.

So it looks like the new law outlaws blocking but doesn't outlaw paid peering. I am still trying to find the reason I should be outraged.